bailout

The bailout crashed, and so did democracy.

Democracy is not perfect, and one of its many imperfections is that voters tend to be ignorant. I don't mean to be insulting. There are, after all, perfectly rational reasons for this ignorance. In a republic of 300 million, the chances of an individual vote affecting a national outcome are slim, and it makes little sense for the individual voter to invest scarce resources in learning about complicated issues, like health care or foreign policy or, just to pick another subject at random, the economy.

Why Barney Frank and Chris Dodd's plan to regulate executive compensation makes economic sense.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson spent the first half of this week warning us that the executive compensation regulations proposed by congressional Democrats will appear "punitive" and scare financial institutions away from participating in the federal bailout. The fact that Paulson has now given in should please, among others, Congressman Barney Frank, who spent the week arguing that such regulations were an issue of fundamental fairness. In Frank's words: "I don't want the federal taxpayer to be at risk for their bad debt and then the guy who incurred the debt gets tens of millions of dollars on the way out the door.''

The financial services industry is tanking. Here's what McCain and Obama won't tell you about the crisis.

When John McCain said last week that the "fundamentals of our economy are still strong," he was wrong twice. First, he was wrong to suggest that the annihilation of modern investment banking was something peripheral to economy. Second, when he claimed that "fundamentals" referred to the robust American workforce, he was wrong again to suggest that average Americans somehow represent a fortress of strength against the onslaught of the credit crisis. On the contrary, we've met the enemy, and the enemy is in our own purses and pockets.